Chapter Text
In 1938, a year of monumental turmoil, the number one newsmaker wasn't Franklin Roosevelt or Adolf Hitler. It wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse owned by a bicycle-repairman-turned-automobile magnate, trained by a virtually mute mustang breaker, and ridden by a half-blind failed prizefighter. The racehorse was Seabiscuit. - Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit: An American Legend, 1999)
The year was 1947. India and Pakistan became free. Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the Major Leagues, and the tensions between the East and the West became stronger, marking the first year of the ‘Cold War’.
And in a pleasant barn in Northern California, a horse slept, ignorant of the goings on of the world around it. His name was Seabiscuit, and at one point he had been the wonder of the American world. Born a grandson of the legendary Man O’ War. Seabiscuit had been marked as a failure from colthood. Small, lazy, and knobby-kneed, the horse was doomed to a life of obscurity, one of the many descendants of the great Man O’ War that amounted to nothing.
An early career of heavy racing and few wins. Seabiscuit had potential, but no time was given to it to succeed. Then the horse, tired, injured and jaded, was sold to the Automobile magnate Charles Howard. There, under a new trainer, a new owner, and at a new coast, Seabiscuit began to thrive, taking race after race, the underdog, broken horse from the poorer coast began to break records, making the national headlines.
It was not long until the rest of the country noticed.
The little horse that could, an underdog when the country needed it most in the midst of the depression. As prominence grew, so did the legend. The culmination of which was the Pimlico Special, The Match of the Century. Seabiscuit vs War Admiral, his cousin.
Seabiscuit came out of it the victor, the poorer west had won out over the richer east. The smaller stable had defeated the giants. From there, Seabiscuit continued his career, suffering injury and setback, but ending having secured the largest purse ever seen by a horse in his time. There, and finally then, he retired. Having raced for six years. A modest studding career followed, too many stables feared sending their mares across the country.
Seabiscuit lived a simple life on the Ridgewood Ranch, his owner Charles Howard seeing him every day. Visitors would come by to see The Biscuit, and the horse would dutifully pose for his photographs before lounging in the sunny hills.
The year was 1947, Seabiscuit was thirteen years old, and he laid down to sleep. It was the seventeenth of May.
Nobody knows how Seabiscuit died. The most likely cause was a heart attack, too much stress built upon the body over too many years. Perhaps he had simply slept too hard, unable to wake itself back up again. The infamous laziness of the horse rearing its ugly head once more. Regardless, on the morning of the eighteenth of May, the stablehand would go rushing to the house to fetch Howard, telling him his prized horse had died young.
But that… isn’t necessarily the end of the story.
Umamusume. They are born to run.
They inherit the names of horses from another world, whose histories were sometimes tragic and sometimes wonderful, and run ever forward.
That is their fate.
No one knows how the races waiting in the futures of these Umamusume will end.
But they will continue to run, aiming only toward the goal in front of them.
Tracen academy was not wholly unique, it was just one of many academies situated across Japan, and by extension the world. Designed to teach Umamusume the specific arts of which they are most uniquely suited. It was the most prestigious in Japan, and one of the most prestigious in the world. But at the end of the day, it was a school. Which meant the vast majority of the time the students there were in class, continuing the same education they had started when they were younger.
Not all Umamusume went on to become racers, some never became racers at all. Some were more suited for more general purpose labor, others wished to not race at all. All Umamusume are competitive… but that meant just as much in the field of Law or Business as it did track and field. Tracen was designed in such a way that even if their students did not succeed in their field careers, they could still find a place in society, and being in Tracen was a unique enough honor in and of itself to be considered worthy of success, much like how a person who went to Harvard or Oxford could successfully make it their entire personality.
Such people are, uniquely, hated by both Umamusume and Humans. But that is neither here nor there. Indeed, Tracen was not a unique place, but it was certainly special. Vaunted, respected, and… feared, in some notable instances. The best and the brightest of all of Japan went there, and, to the surprise of no-one who ever worked with professional athletes, meant it was a concentration of some of the strangest beings alive, Human or Umamusume. Truly, there was very little that could happen at Tracen that would be an honest shock to everyone there. Certainly there were minute surprises, setbacks, upsets and curiosities. But the truly unknown? That was, to repeat. Unknown.
… But it could still happen.
Anything could happen. A fortune teller could communicate with a long dead Umamusume masquerading as a goddess. A coffee obsessed teenager could be haunted by the ghost of her own, otherworldly father. Rice Shower could go a day without crying. Such things were possible in Tracen, however unlikely they would seem outside of it. So really, was it any surprise when a newcomer appeared in the midst?
During physics class?
Specifically, above the class?
Indeed, very frequently problems in Tracen involved a good application of physics, but a screaming Umamusume was not, generally, one of them.
Not generally, but specifically?
—
Falling, falling!
The last thing Seabiscuit remembered was sleeping in hay, nestled against his big friend. Now he was falling. It was a weird place, not the barn, filled with… two-legs. He only had a moment to try and process that before he swung his hooves out, it looked weird, all… pale, and strange. But he didn’t have time to process that either. One of them hit something, the other collided with wood. The first something fell back, shouting and clutching their nose, the second skidding across the floor, knocking another two-leg over and out of sight.
He scrambled, his… hooves? Pale, small, wiggly. Scrambled on the floor. Shouts around him, loud noises. Speech. Speech? Words he could understand. The sounds were familiar, but now they made sense, they were legible to him.
“Machan are you alright!?”
“Who the heck is that!?”
“Grass fell out the window!”
His head snapped up, everyone was tall. Taller than he ever saw two-legs being. Hands reached for him. And he did what thousands of years of instincts told him to do.
He bolted.
—
There were many branches in the ‘government’ of Tracen Academy. Student organizations, official organizations, one or two juntas, and in one minor case a banana republic based entirely on the stock and trade of racing shoes. One of those branches was the Disciplinary Committee. An organization made up of the Umamusume that cherished the rules and regulations above all else, those who believed the only thing that kept society from falling into anarchy was the rule of law.
Naturally there were only two of them.
Bamboo Memory was halfway down the hall, she was between classes, which meant she was doing what she was always doing. Making sure nobody was breaking the rules. It was actually a peaceful day for a change, Tuesdays were, generally, the worst. The students feared Monday, and rebelled on Tuesday. But barring a minor incident involving instant-setting glue and a goat, nothing particularly strange had happened.
Then the door to Classroom 2C opened, well. No. That was incorrect. It flew off of its hinges, the handle ignored entirely as the door bounced along the hall to crash against the far wall, shattering a window in the process. Bamboo Memory only has one, brief second to parse that before a figure dashed out of the classroom. It was an Umamusume, shorter than her by a head and a bit strangely dressed. A red and white shirt, red at the torso, white at the sleeves specifically. With a stylized logo of an ‘H’ on the front of it, stuck in the middle of a triangle. Thin pants, the same color of white as her sleeves ran from her hips to tuck into thick looking brown boots.
Brown hair done up rather fancily was decorated by a little red and white bow on her right ear. Eyes, brown, the same color as her hair in fact… was staring at Bamboo Memory in panic, and closing, for that matter, rapidly.
“Hal-” Bamboo Memory started.
She didn’t finish, but to her credit she started. The smaller Umamusume clipped her, her shoulder colliding with Bamboo Memory’s arm and sending the Uma spinning wildly. She caught, in her chaotic vision, the unknown Uma sprinting down the hall. Then the commotion started, a dozen and more Umamusume charging out of the classroom after the newcomer.
Bamboo, for her part, nearly fell out of the broken window.
—
Left, right. Hands reached for him. Like the two-legs at the track, but less loud. More eager. But less loud. They looked stranger than he remembered, more colorful. Their manes were strange. They kept shouting after him, with words. He could understand those words. He didn’t know why, or how. He couldn’t see as well, he couldn’t hear as well. His legs were wrong, like the two-legs, and he was covered in an extra layer of fur like the two-legs usually were. But his normal layer of fur was missing.
But he was running. His hooves slid on the wooden floor, skidding with the turn. Causing a strange, pink-haired two-leg to crash into a series of lockers. Then he darted forward again, kicking backwards as something tried to grab at his back. More of the two-legs were out here now, coming out of the doors, they joined in chasing after him. Why?
He didn’t know. But they were behind him now. Those that weren’t were knocked aside.
Another set of doors, then he was outside. A hot warmth above, brightness. It was almost something familiar. He leapt forward, landing on grass. His strange hooves dug into the dirt, too deeply, he couldn’t find purchase. He could hear the shouting behind him, the others. He scrambled, strange front hooves digging into the ground and propelling him forward. He could see others out and about, two-legs, all of them. Some were dressed in the same strange clothi-
His eyes caught on something, his eyes flattened, and his legs beat beneath him. A track. There, he could run away there!
—
His feet hit the dirt, and he was galloping again. His chest heaved, he couldn’t draw in enough breath. His eyes stung, they were too small, strange. Two of his legs were gone, he didn’t know where they went. He didn’t know what had happened to his hooves. Why did they remind him of the two-legs so much? But he was running, that was all that mattered.
“Twin Turbo’s gonna catch ya!” A shrill voice sounded behind him, and he kicked back as he ran, hearing a pained yelp sound out as his hoof contacted something solid. He could hear them clearly now, hooves hitting dirt. All behind him, as it should be. The panic was there, but something else came with it, the familiar thrill. A race. Just a bit longer and he would be free. He would win.
The dirt was firm, his legs blurred beneath him. The strange hooves worked. The voices were growing more distant now, the pack being left behind.
He grinned, then made the first turn.
—
“Director Akikawa!”
The door to the office banged open, the heavy mahogany crashing against the stops with enough force to nearly bend the brass holding it in place. Tazuna stood in the doorway, a light sheen of sweat in her forehead. “There’s an intrude-”
“I am aware.” Akikawa said, and the seriousness in her voice caused Tazuna to halt from where she had already been walking forward.
Akikawa, Director of Tracen Academy, stood by the large window behind her desk. It, like everything else in the office, was ornate, and long predated her. As the diminutive director stood before it, hands behind her back, cat sleeping on her shoulder. She almost looked dignified as the afternoon light caught her chestnut hair. “She’s out there on the track now, trying to escape.”
Tazuna stepped forward quickly, dwarfing the director as she looked out over the back of the school. There, indeed, on the dirt training track behind the school she could see a mob of well over forty students… and more than a few blue uniformed members of their security division. The intruder was easy to spot, ahead of the pack by four lengths, though said distance was shortly closing, some of the speedier students closing the gap just before she could leap off of the track an-
Tazuna blinked, watching instead as the intruder turned, going around the back stretch and into the far turn instead of leaving the track and the bounds of the school. Several of the students, surprised by this… or simply clumsy, ran into each other, causing a rather substantial pileup and increased the distance between the intruder and the chasing horses extensively.
“She is on her second lap.” Akikawa says calmly.
“Lap?” Tazuna asked incredulously. “She’s racing?”
“Indeed! A quite spirited show! Perhaps she thinks she can skip the entrance examination that way by putting on a good enough race!”
Tazuna watched, incredulous, as one of their security guards, a six-foot-eight woman named Maria that could, and had bodily thrown students dozens of feet, was knocked off of her own feet. Having apparently made the mistake of trying to get in the way of the intruder as she made her way down the dirt track.
Akikawa snapped her fan open, tapping it against her chin a moment later. “I think an interview is in order! I wish to meet such an excited hopeful. Tazuna, fetch her for me.”
“She… broke through the ceilings of Classroom 2C.”
Akikawa grinned. “Snuck past security! That shows great talent.”
“She broke three lockers, two windows and one door.” Tazuna continued.
“A trifling expense.” Akikawa countered.
“We have nowhere to keep her since the fire that has made Miho Dorm unsafe to live in.” Tazuna stressed, her fingers clutching her skirt rather tightly.
“Ah, yes. Is Shinko Windy still unrepentant?” Akikawa asked.
“She still swears it was merely a prank that got out of hand.”
Akikawa went silent, watching as the hopeful student rounded the homestretch and made her way toward the club turn. She wasn’t moving as fast now, her arms sticking out in front of her. The crowd… was not doing much better, though a few more students were joining in to hopefully sort it all out.
“Well, we can put three students in a dorm room. Make it a team building exercise.” Akikawa said, like it was the simplest, easiest solution in the world.
Tazuna, well versed in the subtle art of herding exploding cats, thought very much otherwise. “Can we… at least… talk to her first?”
The Director laughed. “As I said, I already wished to interview her! Now, fetch her for me while I decide who shall receive a new roommate!”
“... And if she doesn’t pass the interview?”
Akikawa smiled. “She will.”
Tazuna turned to leave, then paused. “Three students are in the infirmary. Haru Urara, Twin Turbo, and Grass Wonder. All with minor injuries, thankfully.”
“... Is that so?” Akikawa murmured, her fan snapping shut. “Well, I suppose that just might work then.” The director watched as the intruder collapsed onto the ground, a dogpile pouncing on her immediately. She couldn’t make out details, but she definitely saw a punch or two.
She grinned as the door closed.
How very energetic. How very exuberant! Yes, this is exactly what the URA Finale would require.